Flash-based file uploading on OS X 10.5
Apple somehow broke web uploading in Flash in OS X 10.5 (Leopard). It wasn’t Flash Player itself, but something in the OS itself. Thankfully the problem has been fixed in 10.5.1 (along with whatever was making Scrabulous look like barf), but now a problem remains from a web development point of view: there’s no good way to figure out what version of an operating system web users are running. To complicate matters, the version number of Flash Player is the same in OS X 10.5.1 as it was in 10.5.0 (9.0.47 if you’re curious).
To work around this problem in Dabble DB for instance, we disabled Flash uploading for all Mac users with Flash 9.0.47. This had the unfortunate side effect of punishing OS X 10.4 users who had upgraded their Flash Player, but at least they could still use the non-Flash interface to upload. Now that the problem is fixed, we’d like to make the Flash uploading accessible to everyone again though, because frankly, the “normal” non-Flash uploading process in web browsers is one of the worst interface crimes ever perpetrated on the browsing public. But without being able to detect what OS a user is running, we will be forced to break uploading completely for Leopard 10.5.0 users. At some point I hope such users will have upgraded, but when is that a safe assumption? In a week? A month? When 10.5.2 comes out? I’m not sure what the answer is.